How to End Procrastination

Do you find it hard to motivate yourself to do particular tasks or jobs? How do you feel, when another week goes by and you still haven’t done, what you promised yourself you would do – maybe a month or even six months ago?

In my experience, a lack of motivation can be caused by thinking too much about a task in its totality. We look at the pile of ironing or the mountain of filing and we groan under the weight of it and we think “Oh there’s so much to do – I’ll never get through it all. It’s going to take ages.” We feel drained just thinking about it. We make a promise to ourselves “I’ll do it tomorrow, definitely tomorrow – when I feel more like doing it.” I’m talking here about filing or ironing, but it could just as easily be writing up a report or thesis, doing maths homework or redecorating a room.

three items’ rule, we immediately reduce the task to a manageable level. “three – ah yeah, I can manage that – no bother – three – sure I’ll have those done in no time.” We discover that doing just three things, gets us over our initial foot dragging, lack of enthusiasm.A solution, for this kind of lack of motivation, is to focus on doing just three things at a time. When we apply the

Quite often, when we make a three item start, we realize that it’s not that difficult to keep going and we decide to do a few more and maybe a few more after that. Sometimes we feel so much in the ‘groove’ that we decide to do the whole darn lot in one go. But even if this doesn’t happen, even if we stick to doing just three things, we still get to feel proud of ourselves, we still get to feel a sense of achievement – we set ourselves a challenge and we stepped up – we delivered – we did the three things that we said we’d do and because we achieved our goal, we feel better about ourselves. The other thing is, if we manage to apply the three a day rule over a seven day period, that’s usually sufficient to create a sizeable hole in even the biggest mountain or pile.